Uncrunched

If you’ve read my stuff over the years you know that I love simple things that work well.

If you sit down with me and after ten minutes of describing your company I have no idea what your product is, things aren’t going well. This actually happens in about 10% of pitches I hear.

If you sit down and say two sentences and then I start babbling about how awesome that is and repeating it to you in an understandable way and then suddenly I’m on my phone downloading your app or visiting your website, things are going much better.

So, Crowdcall. Yesterday Pat Gallagher and I had lunch with Randy Adams in Palo Alto (yes, he looks a little bit like Jeff Bezos). Randy is a tech legend – one of the first board members of Yahoo, the software architect of NeXT, founder of the ill-fated but audacious SearchMe, founding board member of Funny Or Die.

Randy’s involved with a new startup, CrowdCall. Here’s what it does – easy, free conference calls with your contacts, without the need for them to download an app, no service to sign up for, no new conference call numbers to store.

When you call someone you can just hit “add call” and get a bunch of people on the phone (this is how we do CrunchFund partner meetings). Or you can use CrowdCall, create lists of groups that you call frequently (think family, team meetings, etc.) and with a single click call all of them at once.

That’s it. You don’t even create an account when you download the app, and the people you call don’t need the app.

It’s brilliantly stupidly simple and it is clearly now one of the daily-use apps on my phone. CrowdCall isn’t going to change the world. But it fixes a problem in an uncomplicated way.

And now it’s spreading like crazy. All I did was tweet about it yesterday. NextWeb saw that tweet and posted about it. Then Life Hacker. Then CNet.

Whenever someone is called for the first time via the app, CrowdCall sends out a text message about the service to that person. They don’t send it out ever again. But that’s how the service is spreading virally.

Thank you, Randy, for showing me CrowdCall yesterday. I hope we become shareholders soon.

Image lifted from Cnet article linked above.

I invested in Snapguide, which launched today to a mountain of positive press, well before CrunchFund was formed last year, although the investment was later transferred to the fund. It was an incredibly easy decision.

Back in 2010 Daniel Raffel and Steve Krulewitz left their senior product/engineering jobs at Yahoo and Google, respectively, to start a new company. I broke the news about the startup, although they wouldn’t tell me what they were going to build (I don’t think they even knew yet).

It didn’t matter. I told Daniel I wanted to invest. He and Steve are what’s called “blank check guys” in the VC world. That means you invest in them if you can no matter what crazy ideas they have, because they are so smart and so driven that they’ll likely figure out a way to win big eventually.

Mike Volpi at Index ventures put together a round, and I invested, in June last year.

So what is Snapguide, who’s Leslie, and why will she love it?

Leslie is a TechCruncher who may have written the saddest tweet ever about trying out Pair (a social network for couples) even though she doesn’t have anyone to try it out with.

Leslie says she’ll try out any app if we’re an investor, so she needs to try out Snapguide today. The app is full of amazing how-to guides, and it doesn’t require a boyfriend to use it properly. But that description doesn’t adequately describe Snapguide.

First, it’s made for mobile devices, and it assumes you’ll have that device with you while you’re following the guides. Lots of big, beautiful pictures and videos. Easy to follow directions. And you can chat with other users and the guide creator as well.

There are already some great guides on Snapguide, even though it just launched. But what the service really needs is new guides! There’s something that you are amazing at, right?

Maybe you have the best ever recipe for something that you made up and perfected over the years and want to share. Or you know how to build a house using only duct tape and old tires. Or you are the worlds leading expert on making sock puppets. Whatever. Make a guide and see if the world loves it. I bet they do.

More on Snapguide at Pando Daily, TechCrunch, GigaOm, LifeHacker and AllThingsD.

When I see my quote about the new batch of Y Combinator companies printed in this CNET article by Daniel Terdiman it just looks weird to me, different than how it sounded to myself when I thought/said it (bolded the part about the innocents):

While some of the teams that are part of Y Combinator include tech industry veterans, many are made up of first-time entrepreneurs, and that’s something Arrington finds refreshing.

Arrington said he appreciates that the teams coming out of Y Combinator tend not to be jaded and are mainly made up of “young guys that have never been screwed over” by standard Silicon Valley politics. And these teams are “re-energizing Silicon Valley with the fresh blood of innocence,” he said.

Of course, Arrington has a vested interest in the success of many of the companies presenting here. He said CrunchFund will likely invest in about 15 of the startups in the current Y Combinator program.

I meant “innocents” not “innocence” but the meaning clear. Only in print it sounds so jaded and sinister – like we’re sending lambs to slaughter.

What I was thinking when I said that is more about the “man in the arena” stuff, how entrepreneurs should fight on in the face of constant criticism from the press and other people who express jealousy through criticism, as well as the exhausting, cumulative and soul destroying wear and tear that entrepreneurs endure as willing or unwilling participants in Silicon Valley politics.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know what I mean. If you aren’t, you probably don’t.

Anyhow, back to Y Combinator. Twice a year I get to sit in on a magical event, where dozens of new bright eyed and bushy tailed founders get on stage and show the world what they’ve built.

They talk about how they want to change the world. And no matter how absurd their dreams (one founder today said “our software will literally be installed on every Internet connected device in the world”), I can’t help but be swept up in the moment.

So what if a year from now some of these founders will have failed miserably. So what if others get churned through the machine and come out the other end a little less than whole. A few will become giants and lead future generations of entrepreneurs. And in six months or so a whole new batch of ’em will be coming through again. And they’ll be just as bushy tailed as the last ones were.

Today was a good day in Silicon Valley. It was Y Combinator Demo Day, where everyone is a unique and special flower, with nothing but happy days full of promise to come.

I remember way back in 2007 when Facebook first launched their app platform. Developers were free to add their own advertising and user transactions, Zuckerberg said, and Facebook wouldn’t take a cut.

Developers flocked to Facebook and a symbiotic relationship emerged. Some developers got fat and happy on money made from Facebook users, and Facebook eventually started forcing developers to use Facebook’s credit system, where Facebook took a non negotiable 30% fee.

No developers really yelled “bait and switch,” although Zynga came close. If they don’t care I don’t care, and everyone seems to be getting along fine now.

Still, I find the way Facebook phrases its tax fascinating. “Facebook paid more than $1.4 billion to game developers (and other app makers) in 2011,” said Facebook today (this was previously reported too).

That’s sort of like the Federal government issuing a press release that they “paid” citizens whatever they didn’t take that year in taxes. It suggests Facebook’s thinking is that all of the money is theirs, really, and that they passed so much along is worth of a back slap. Or it’s just brilliant PR. Or both.

Awesome.

This probably doesn’t violate any laws, or even Google’s new privacy policy, but it is definitely creepy. If you search for “pet meds” on Google and you’re signed in, Google pre-fills your gmail address into the ad widget. That doesn’t mean they’ve automatically sent it to the advertiser – God help them if they did – but it sends the absolute wrong message to users about where Google’s priorities lie.

And for it to be happening now, while they are rolling out their new privacy policy and taking criticism from all over the world, is just dumb.

I go to Google to do searches. I don’t go there to do social networking, but they thrust that into my face. And I certainly don’t go to Google to have it pre-fill personal information into advertisements for me. Stop it.